Woot! Bribery!

In case you haven't noticed it yet, one of the fundamental credos of this blog is that social engineering is the answer to many of the problems of MMORPGs. If you don't like the term social engineering, you can also call it bribery. Like Blizzard does:

The long queue times are, of course, caused by a very simple lack of representation in the Dungeon Finder by tanks, and to some extent healers. We don't feel the tanking and healing roles have any inherent issues that are causing the representation disparity, except that fulfilling them carries more responsibility. Understandably, players prefer to take on that responsibility in more organized situations than what the Dungeon Finder offers, but perhaps we can bribe them a little.

So in future people queueing up for the most under-represented role in the Dungeon Finder (meaning tanks in 80% of cases, healers in 20% of cases, and dps in 0% of cases) will get an additional bribe reward in the form of a goody bag containing "some gold, a chance at a rare gem, a chance at a flask/elixir (determined by spec), a good chance of receiving a non-combat pet (including cross faction pets), and a very rare chance at receiving a mount".

If you consider role representation the responsability of the developers alone, this is the absolutely best possible solution. I like it. Personally I would have liked it even more if players would consider role representation at least partially to be also the responsability of the players, and would have queued up as tanks without a bribe; but that obviously was an utopian pipe dream. So, woot to bribery!